Coaching Emotional Agility
May 09, 2025
Coaching Emotional Agility
Guiding Clients Through What They Feel, Not Just What They Say
Emotional agility is the ability to navigate inner experiences—thoughts, emotions, and self-stories—with openness, courage, and clarity. For clients, especially high achievers accustomed to pushing through discomfort, this skill is essential in building resilience, making value-aligned decisions, and sustaining wellbeing. In coaching, emotional agility emerges not only as a topic but also as a practice we model and co-create with our clients.
Recognising the Coaching Opportunity
Clients may not ask directly to develop emotional agility. Instead, they present with dilemmas, stuck patterns, or self-talk that masks the real internal challenge. This is where the coach’s capacity to listen for the unspoken becomes vital.
In a recent session with one of my clients, they began by saying, “I’m frustrated with my team—they’re not stepping up.” Rather than move straight into solution-focused questioning, I stayed with the emotion and asked, “What’s sitting underneath that frustration for you?” After a pause, they acknowledged feeling invisible and unappreciated in their role. This shift—from surface-level frustration to a deeper emotional truth—created space for a more meaningful conversation around their values, sense of recognition, and leadership style.
This is an example of PCC Marker 6.4: Notices and Explores Emotions in action. By naming the emotional tone and inviting further reflection, I was able to support the client to connect with their inner experience more honestly. The session continued with questions aligned to PCC Marker 7.4: Asks Questions That Help the Client Explore Beyond Their Current Thinking, allowing them to reframe their assumptions about their team, clarify their leadership values, and begin to explore what they needed to ask for in order to feel seen and supported.
Strategies for Coaching Emotional Agility
Building emotional agility doesn’t require complex techniques. It requires presence, psychological safety, and a willingness to pause and stay curious. Here are three strategies I often use to support clients in this space:
1. Name It to Tame It
When a client is experiencing a strong emotion, I invite them to slow down and name what’s happening. This might sound like:
- “If you could name the feeling, what would you call it?”
- “Is there more than one emotion showing up here?”
Helping clients to identify and name emotions supports PCC Marker 6.5: Allows the Client to Explore and Express Their Emotions. It also helps them begin to relate to their internal experience with more clarity and compassion.
2. Values-Based Reflection
Emotions often signal when a value is being honoured or violated. When clients feel stuck or reactive, I bring attention to their values with prompts such as:
- “What does this emotion reveal about what’s important to you right now?”
- “Which of your core values might be at play here?”
This approach aligns with PCC Marker 7.5: Invites the Client to Consider How to Move Forward, not through problem-solving but by reconnecting to what matters most.
3. Observer Mindset
When emotions feel overwhelming, I guide clients to step into an observer perspective. A simple prompt like: “If you were watching this interaction on a screen, what would you notice?” can create a moment of distance and awareness.
This technique supports PCC Marker 5.3: Demonstrates Curiosity During the Coaching Process and helps clients become more conscious of their patterns and options.
Coaching Practice: Self-Reflection and Development
As coaches, we also need emotional agility. This includes noticing when we might be reacting to a client’s discomfort or skipping past an emotional cue. In mentor coaching conversations, I often support coaches to review session transcripts with a focus on emotional presence.
In one case, a coach moved quickly to solution-focused questions when a client expressed feeling “defeated.” Together, we explored what may have been possible if they had acknowledged that feeling and stayed with it. This reflection revealed the coach’s own discomfort with failure—a valuable insight that aligned with Competency 2: Embodies a Coaching Mindset, particularly in the area of self-awareness and ongoing reflective practice.
Questions I often invite coaches to consider include:
- What emotional shifts did I notice in the client, and how did I respond?
- Was there an opportunity to pause and explore further?
- How did I support the client to make meaning of their emotional experience?
Final Thoughts
Emotional agility is not about being emotionally neutral or always positive. It’s about being willing to sit with what arises, stay open, and support the client in making meaning from their experience. As coaches, our ability to model this way of being, through our presence, curiosity, and acceptance, has a direct impact on the depth and effectiveness of our work.
Developing emotional agility is deeply aligned with the ICF Core Competency Model. It lives within presence, listening, and evoking awareness—all essential skills for transformative coaching.
Sharing these mentoring moments with you,
Gaye
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